Social Media

This App Syncs Multi-Camera Footage Into One Video

Social video producers just got a powerful new tool. Switchcam Director is a web app that automatically synchronizes footage of an event from multiple cameras and turns it into one tidy interactive video.

The idea caught the attention of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who invested in the company and also serves as an advisor to the creative team. Coming out of a private beta phase, Switchcam released its new app to the public early Monday morning.

"We're aiding in the creation of video, that's something that YouTube doesn't do — especially multi-camera creation," Switchcam CEO Brett Welch tells Mashable. "We can select footage from hundreds of different people. We automatically synchronize it together and pop a video out at the end provides multiple camera angles."

The philosophy behind Switchcam is that most of the best video content on the planet features multiple camera angles. And between all the people toting smartphone cameras, DSLRs with video capability, GoPros and other digital camcorders, there is no shortage of potential videographers. If all these people can get on the same page, it would make for a much richer social video experience.

"Most families have two or three video cameras between them, and I've still never seen any shows that are shot from one camera angle," Welch says. "Having multiple camera angles will increase engagement, and it's more interesting."

Switchcam's main feature is that it automatically synchronizes footage from multiple cameras with a sound-recognition algorithm. Within minutes it turns multiple videos of the same event into a single video where the user can decide which camera angle to view at a given time. In the demo video below, you can switch between three camera angles, including a GoPro that is strapped to the skateboarder's head.

In addition to auto-syncing and hosting the videos, Switchcam Director also aims to help coordinate crowdsourced productions. A curator can schedule a geotagged event. Then, people can sign up to be part of the camera crew or sign up to follow the event. After the event happens, members of the camera crew will be prompted to upload their footage. When the final video is published, everyone involved gets notified.

After all the footage is in the system, the event's curator has control over which videos to include in the final published version. The curator can also promote and feature certain angles, while moving the weaker footage toward the bottom of the list.

Another nice feature, especially for concerts, is that the curator can choose to replace the videos' audio tracks with any MP3 from the event. For instance, if he or she can get hold of the soundboard recording from a concert, that could serve as the videos soundtrack.

"That's the difference between a distorted audio experience that everyone sort of cringes at and one that sounds good," Welch says.

Switchcam Director is free to use and the site hosts videos for free, and there is an embed code generator to enable sharing on blogs.

The only cost involved with Switchcam comes if you want to use the service to crowdsource and compile footage to publish elsewhere, such as YouTube or Vimeo. There is a $95 fee to export videos, and while you can still combine footage from multiple angles, the exported video will not be interactive.

As far as the app itself, it is not quite a finished product. Welch says Switchcam's creative team is still working on improvements, such as being able to cut certain parts of videos without scrapping the entire take.

"We're not trying to build a professional-level video editing tool — instead we're trying to make it really easy for anybody to create a multicamera video," Welch says.

User Experience

To get a better feel for Switchcam Director's capabilities, we decided to give it a try.

We stationed five smartphone-toting "videographers" and one actual videographer with a DSLR throughout the Mashable newsroom. Most used the default camera apps on their phones, but I decided to demo the Switchcam iOS app, which allows you to sign up to shoot video of an event and automatically upload your footage afterwards.

Then, we had our business editor's daughter, Willow, ride a Razor Scooter up and down the rows between our desks. Knowing that the syncing technology is based on audio, we asked her to make noises, to which she happily acquiesced.

It was a makeshift shoot that yielded about 15 seconds of usable footage per camera. Using the app, my footage was sent directly to the event, "Mashable Shenanigans," that I had created the previous day.

Everyone else emailed their footage to me for uploading. In an ideal world, they would also have Switchcam accounts and they would have signed on to be part of my video crew for the event. Regardless, the uploading process still went fine. It allows one user to upload multiple videos, so I uploaded all the videos from my crew.

When all were in, I hit the sync button and the app told me it would email me when my video was ready. Just a few minutes later I got an email that the video was ready for me to curate, which is the last step before publishing.

On the curation page, I saw that only two of the clips synced together, the other four played linearly afterwards. When I deleted the non-synced video I was left with a somewhat sad two-angle interactive video.

I thought it might have been because the videos were different lengths, so I trimmed them all down to the same size (using iMovie), which led to a few more lessons. First, you can't re-sync footage from a particular event. I had to create a new event and re-upload all my clips.

When I created the new event, I set the current time and date. But when everything was uploaded I couldn't immediately sync because the system thought my event was still in progress. You can't sync until at least four hours after an event ends, which makes sense because it gives your camera crew time to upload videos.

So I created a new event, set it to a few days prior, uploaded and hit sync. It was the same basic result as the first time. Two clips synced together, the rest did not.

In a debriefing session with CEO Brett Welch, he told me that the app is not currently made for events shorter than one minute, rather it was imagined for events such as weddings, conferences and concerts. It seems as if the algorithm didn't quite have time to figure out our shenanigans. Welch said they are working on this issue, because they realize that social video often includes shorter instances.

"We're working on this right now since we've already seen folks creating more videos like the ones in your example," Welch says. "It's a matter of tuning for different use cases and improving over time."

The Switchcam team applied its "newer syncing tech" to our footage, which got five out of our six videos to sync. Here's the final product. (Note: Switchcam embeds only show three angles, for the full five angle video go here.)

Our experiment taught us a couple of things. First, Switchcam has unique potential. Everyone in the office was completely intrigued when they heard about the app. From demo videos on Switchcam's site, it's clear the app can produce terrific results.

Second, we learned that there is going to be a learning curve before we (social video producers) master this technique. Everything from creating events to uploading footage is straightforward. Like anything new, however, it takes time to figure out how to optimize it. Meanwhile, Switchcam developers are going to watch to see how their users are interacting with the app, and continue build the product accordingly.

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is a leading source for news, information and resources for the Connected Generation. Mashable reports on the importance of digital innovation and how it empowers and inspires people around the world. Mashable's record 42 million unique visitors worldwide and 21 million social media followers are one of the most influential and engaged online communities. Founded in 2005, Mashable is headquartered in New York City with an office in San Francisco.